There’s really nothing inherently wrong with — or even new about — punk’s mainstream popularity. After all, wimpy derivatives of it have been riding the charts since the late ’70s, and all it’s done is strengthened the resolve of the bands and fans who choose not to buy in or…
The Cars Are the Stars is what the Postal Service would be with a spookier undertow and song structures as loose as ball bearings dropped on slick marble. Fragments has lofty ceilings and oceanic depths, songs that sound like underwater caverns populated with analog synths. The Cars Are the Stars,…
Prolific as a deceased rapper, chamber-pop outfit Matt Pond PA is hard to keep up with. This year, the group released an EP and a full-length, and next month another immaculate collection of delicate pop hits the bins. Winter Songs includes one original tune and two brief instrumentals, but the…
Through no fault of my own, I’ve seen nearly every episode of American Idol over the past couple of years, and while I rooted most fervently for a case of highly contagious laryngitis, I considered Fantasia Barrino and Ruben Studdard to be the next-best alternatives in their respective seasons, for…
With 3 Weeks In, the EP that Laymen Terms released earlier this year, the Colorado Springs band displayed a bare-assed work in progress, a transition from pop-punk ho-hum to epic rock drama and a promise of greater things to come. Damn. Who would have known they’d actually transcend those expectations?…
Dan Treanor is a veteran of the Denver scene, having served as the backbone for a bluesy band called Arc Light. However, his brightest work to date can be found on African Wind, a disc released by Northern Blues, the Canadian imprint that helped the rest of the planet discover…
In the liner notes for its 2003 disc Women and Children Die First, guitarist Peter Kowalsky, the most visible spokesman for this Florida-based group, writes, “Hardcore is dying rapidly….” Many bands are passed off as hardcore bands and new kids to the scene think that this is an accurate representation…
Propaganda-loving Americans are welcome to disagree, but James Taylor’s (not that James Taylor) French chateau sounds like a mighty inspiring place to make a record — if only to those “freedom-hating” citizens who flat-out refuse to rename their deep-fried potatoes. Swayzak, the electronica trio Taylor belongs to, certainly found it…
David Lowery is apparently in a nostalgic mood. This past August, he appeared at Boulder’s Fox Theatre as the frontman of Camper Van Beethoven, a band that made the ’80s a funnier and odder decade; the act’s comeback CD, New Roman Times, embraced its trademark idiosyncrasies — and sold squat…
Like his contemporary Townes Van Zandt, Loudon Wainwright III comes from a wealthy and blue-blooded family — but he spit out the upper crust in the late ’60s to embrace the everyman poetics of folk music. Since then, the course of his career has jackknifed all over the place, from…
It’s been a few years since the world has heard Bob Schneider — on an album, at least. The clubs are another story. Schneider may be one of the hardest-working men in the music biz. And that should work in his favor, because it takes seeing the guy live to…
It’s pretty funny that one of the best Saddle Creek releases in recent memory isn’t even on Saddle Creek. The lauded Nebraska label is, of course, home to Bright Eyes, the Good Life and the defunct Desaparecidos — three acts that ’89 Cubs draw members from. But the Cubs’ debut,…
Bobby-soxers, beware: The Lettermen are back, serenading audiences with sentimental favorites in their sweet, sanguine style, a combination of cable-knit harmonies and cashmere vocals that’s made women swoon for more than four decades. Over the years, as members left and were replaced, the group’s popularity continued, and if some of…
Few local bands explode out of your stereo the first time you slap their discs in — especially if they’re as new as Le Boom. But even though the foursome has only been extant for a few months, its members have been around the block, and then some: Bassist/singer Maylyn…
New York, Detroit and Chicago are usually credited as birthplaces of modern dance music, but the sounds coming from Miami over the course of the past decade have done just as much to shape the culture. Take, for example, the output of Miami’s Edgar V, who is slated to make…
It’s cold, the sky is spitting rain, and I’m driving a dead man’s car across Texas to see Chin Up Chin Up. The Chicago quintet is playing tonight in Denton, north of Dallas, and since I just spent Thanksgiving with my girlfriend’s family in San Antonio, I figured I’d trek…
Some of the nearly forty holiday discs critiqued below are naughty. Some are nice. And some are as toxic as Aunt Matilda’s fruitcake. As usual, plenty of celebrities are looking to pad their bank accounts via Christmas recordings, and few appear to have broken a sweat while making them. Jessica…
Once upon a time, Bob Seger urged, “Get out of Denver, baby, go, go.” And for many years, if you were a musician in this town, that exhortation would have seemed sage. Today, though, the words sound hollow. Because right now, it’s all about Mootown. Don’t be surprised if a…
Gee whiz, is it Christmastime already? What’s that? I’m sorry: It’s hard to hear you over the sounds of cash registers clanging. Oh, what prompted Jay-Z and Linkin Park to unleash this ill-conceived collaboration upon the masses, you ask? Why, to milk their hardcore fans, of course. Because those are…
When stars who rose to fame in bands toss out a solo album, the music they make on their own often drips with pretentiousness. So it comes as a legitimate relief to discover that the grandest personal statement on Love, Angel, Music, Baby, Gwen Stefani’s inaugural outing, is the “What…
As a self-described introduction to the music of Junior Kimbrough, this tribute album fails spectacularly: These versions of his songs are so radically and haphazardly interpreted that they give only the faintest clue as to what set Kimbrough apart from other such venerated bluesmen. And yet almost every eclectic cut…
At its best, Crunk Juice isn’t so much a recapitulation of Lil Jon’s previous work as an amplification of it. The beats are beatier. The synths are synthier. The screaming is screamier. “It’s the most incredible experience you ever felt in your fuckin’ life!” he declares on the title cut,…
